Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

This famous sonnet and its companion painting comprise
a paradigm of DGR's involuted and polyvalent aesthetic procedures.
These works, individually and composite, hold themselves open to the
most radical kinds of divergent views. The differentials are perhaps
epitomized in the history of the painting's production. When it was
first seen and exhibited, Lilith's head was modelled on Fanny Cornforth,
and that image is captured in two of the earliest and most important
commentaries on the painting, by Swinburne and Stephens. Later,
however, DGR painted out Fanny's head and replaced it with the head of
Alexa Wilding. (These two favorite models represented for DGR
real/mortal beauty, on one hand, and ideal/heavenly beauty on the other.
Thus, in the end the painting internalized, as it were, the original
dialectic it played out (objectively) with its paired
antithesis Sibylla
Palmifera, whose model was Alexa Wilding.)
Elena Rossetti Angeli aptly notes that the two sonnets and their
accompanying pictures constitute “a new expression of Amor Sacro e Profano of Titian” (see her
Dante Gabriel
Rossetti (1906), 31
).

Despite the common view of the sonnet as a
representation of the Rossettian femme fatale
—which the sonnet certainly is—the poem develops various
contradictory ideas out of its symbolic/allegorical images. To see this more
clearly we should recall DGR's general comment on reading Dante. In a note to
the Donna della Finestra passage in the
Vita Nuova DGR says:
“what I believe to lie
at the heart of all true Dantesque commentary . . . is, the existence always of
the actual events even where the allegorical superstructure has been
raised by Dante himself.” The best readers of DGR have always followed
exactly this approach toward Dante's greatest Victorian inheritor. In the present
case, then, if we attempt to reconstruct a set of “actual events”
within the “allegorical superstructure” of the sonnet, we
recover an antithesis very like the one played out in the painting. In the
case of the sonnet, however, the key figures are DGR's wife Elizabeth and
Jane Morris

The sonnet's most apparent intertext, that is to say the
sonnet in The House of Life titled
“Life-in-Love”, brings the issues into sharp relief. The
key figure is the “strangling golden hair.” Commentators have
regularly associated this hair with Fanny Cornforth and have elaborated
commentaries on that association, which is based largely on the relation of
the sonnet to the original painting. But in the context of
The House of Life the
hair has to be associated with Elizabeth. Such an association appears at
first quite paradoxical, since elsewhere DGR's dead wife stands as a figure of
a certain spiritual presence, and scarcely as a sign of “Body's Beauty”.

These contradictions are to be registered, not necessarily
resolved. They are complicated when DGR's own “bright web” of
his poetical intertexts is further elaborated—for instance, when here
we read the sonnet also in relation to the companion sonnet of
“Life-in-Love”, that
is, with
“Death-in-Love”, a poem explicitly associated with Elizabeth.

The symbolic/allegorical figure of Lilith can help to
clarify these kinds of contradictions. The legends represent Lilith
not only as the witch-figure realized in
“Eden Bower”, but
as a threatening and haunting absent presence (see WMR,
Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870
483-486
, where a compendium of the legends is
supplied). Read as a sign of
DGR's dead wife, Lilith is to Eve as Elizabeth is to Jane. But of course in
DGR's case all autobiographical schemas are themselves sign-systems, not
ultimate explanatory references. They function in his work as
the imaginative locus of the conflicted emotional relations that so
typify DGR's poetry and pictures.

The sonnet of course forms a pair with
“Soul's Beauty”,
the two comprising an investigation of the ancient theme of sacred and
profane love. See also DGR's
translation of Dante's sonnet on much the same theme,
“Of Beauty
and Duty”.

Textual History: Composition

Only one manuscript of the sonnet survives, DGR's corrected copy in the Fitzwilliam composite “House of Life” sequence. The precise date of composition is not known, but it was almost
certainly written while the painting was being executed in 1866. In any case the
sonnet existed by 27 October 1866, for on that date George Boyce recorded in his
diary that “Gabriel had been painting a beautiful picture he proposes
calling Lady Lilith, and has written a fine sonnet under it.”

Textual History: Revision

The sestet of the
first printed text of 1868 differs in notable ways
from the received text. The alterations were made in the
Penkill Proofs
in August or September 1869. As with its companion sonnet
“Soul's Beauty”, a major revision
involves its respositioning in DGR's works: in the 1870
Poems the
sonnet appears among the
Sonnets for
Pictures, but in 1881 DGR made it a part of The House of Life.
The shift in placement brought a change in the 1870 title, “Lilith. (For a Picture)”, to the received title; and there was a small
change in line 7 as well.

Production History

Following WMR, Surtees says it
was begun in 1864 (see WMR,
DGR as Designer and Writer
64
); but it was
commissioned (by Leyland) in 1866 and may not have been begun until
that year; in any case, the surviving studies all date from no
earlier than 1866, except for two undated notebook sketches. The
finished (oil) painting
is dated 1868 but it may not have been completed and
sent to Leyland until 1869. In 1872 DGR secured the painting back from
Leyland to make some alterations, including the removal of Fanny Cornforth's
face as the model for Lilith and the substitution of Alexa Wilding's face.
Accounts differ about whether Leyland asked to have this important change made,
or whether it was DGR himself who wanted it.

Four surviving copies of the picture preserve Fanny Cornforth's head: the
oil replica in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
the crayon drawing in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art,
the pastel drawing in the Harry Ransom Research Center, and
the chalk drawing in a private collection.

Reception

Iconographic

DGR's comments on his “picture-sonnet” to
his friend Hake are to the point here: “You ask me
about Lilith—I suppose referring to the picture-sonnet.
The picture is called Lady Lilith by rights (only
I thought this would present a difficulty in print without paint to explain it,)
and represents a Modern Lilith combing out her abundant
golden hair and gazing on herself in the glass with that self-absorption by
whose strange fascination such natures draw others within their own circle. The
idea which you indicate (viz: of the perilous principle in the world
being female from the first) is about the most essential notion of the
sonnet.” (see
Fredeman, Correspondence, (21 April 1870) 70. 110
).

Pictorial

The details in
the poem reproduce those in the painting,
except that DGR repeatedly alludes to the
legendary and mythic materials that
inspired him to paint the picture.

Historical

Allen calls attention to the contemporary relation between
the figure of the femme fatale and the Women's Emancipation Movement in
England. More specifically, she notes that among DGR's papers was a
letter to the editor of the
Athenaeum
dated November 1869 in which the author, Ponsonby A.
Lyons, makes the following observation: “Lilith, about whom you ask for
information, was the first strong-minded woman and the original advocate of
women's rights” (see WMR,
Rossetti Papers 1862-1870
483
).

Literary

The poem should be compared with DGR's
translation of a passage from Goethe (Lilith—from Goethe) and of course
with his major work on this subject, “Eden Bower”. At least as relevant is
the earlier sonnet in The House of
Life, Life-in-Love, which is plainly recalled at the conclusion of this poem.
The influence of Keats's “La Belle Dame
Sans Merci” is equally clear—a text, it
should be recalled, famous for the ambiguous presentation of the
knight at arms' witch-lady.

Autobiographical

The autobiographical subtext of this work is
radically conflicted. In one view Lilith is the figural form
associated with Fanny Cornforth, but in another Lilith stands for
DGR's dead wife Elizabeth. Those associations create an inertia for
realizing the more oblique presence of Jane Morris in the poem,
who in one view is figured as Eve (whereas in another, Eve is
a sign of Elizabeth).